Pages tagged "Civil Rights Movements"

Today, most of us are only too painfully aware of leftists’ worldwide difficulty in winning and exercising power. Capital’s enhanced global mobility, legal challenges by undemocratic transnational bodies like the World Trade Organization, and the explosion of service jobs that offer little chance for wage and revenue growth sabotage states’ tools for safeguarding their people, firms, and environment. Governments starve for funds to implement the policies we socialists love, and our forebears fought bitter struggles to achieve: universal programs that prioritize human needs for food, shelter, health care, education; and regulations that protect humans and the planet and allow people a life outside of work.

Americans are familiar with the language of political and civil rights – one person, one voice, one vote; equal treatment before the law. We are less familiar with the justification for the social rights that have been at the center of our great political and social movements over the last century. For all citizens to flourish in a democratic society, they must be guaranteed such basic human needs as high-quality education, health care and security in old age. These goods are provided to every member of most democratic societies not by purchase on the private market, but through equitably financed, high-quality public goods and social insurance.

Join Steve Max, a founder of the legendary community organizing school, the Midwest Academy, to practice talking about socialism in plain language. Create your own short rap. Use your personal experience and story to explain democratic socialism. Prepare for those conversations about socialism that happen when you table or canvass. This workshop is for those who have already had an introduction to democratic socialism, whether from DSA's webinar or from other sources. Questions? Contact Theresa Alt <talt@igc.org> 607-280-7649.

DSA was concerned to find out that the company that provides our website and online organizing infrastructure, NationBuilder, had as a client the Trump campaign and other right-wing candidates. Progressives built this kind of infrastructure and tools for digital organizing and we have now lost that organizing edge. We are moving to identify other options for a CMS/CRM. As an under-resourced, member funded organization, this move will take time for us to carry out, but it is an important statement for us to make.